The Things You Forget
by varletun
Summary: Based on The Chronicles of Narnia, sort of after Book VI. A short, angsty piece. It broke my heart, while writing it.


Disclaimer: C.S. Lewis is mighty cool, yeah.

Rating: G

Notes: It's a little over done, this sort of fic on Susan and what happened to her. But, well, this is my view. Since I'm a Christian, it's a little more Christian-influenced than a fic really strictly ought to be, but The Chronicles of Narnia, I think, are really a distinct parallel with Christianity, and so to divide it away from that would be kind of OOC for all of it, really.

Okay, so, like, that's all I have to say. Thanks, enjoy, and tell me what you think? :)

- - -

You rush into the room, wind-swept hair blowing across your cheeks flushed pink by the cold.

Hot tears already stain your wide-open eyes, and you stare wildly into the faces of the uniformed London policemen, challenging them, challenging their lies. They look away as the truth, like a horrible, horrible bucket of iced water over your head, comes crashing down upon you, and as your tears fall heavily, heavily to the wooden floor you wonder _why._

When they've left you sit down, and you register numbly that your parents' lawyer is explaining to you about your parents' will. He says that everything is yours, now, and it makes you wonder why, then, that it feels like you have nothing.

Your hair shimmers a plastic golden as sunlight from the windows falls over you. You've streaked it, teased it so it curls in a bob round your ears and I almost can't see you without the luscious black hair that once grew and fell to almost your feet. The hum of lawyers and concerned, distraught relatives who drop by has dwindled to nothing, and it's evening by the time you lie down on your bed, exhausted from the crying and something else that just makes you feel _empty_.

Fear – you know it well – grips it talons ever tighter around your shoulders, your neck, your chest, and you reason absently with yourself that it is to be expected.

After all, it isn't every day that you find yourself alone, alone, truly alone in the world. So for today, fear is all right, even though you hate it.

Those painted wings that are your eyelids flutter shut over your once-sparkling eyes.

_I will you to remember. I will you to remember what I once said. _

I breathe upon you, breath upon your cold, cold cheeks. Your eyes shoot open again, startled and for a moment I see the face of that ancient, beautiful Queen I used to know. I laugh inwardly at your expression of innocent astonishment, and I wonder how you could have forgotten that when I move, _I am silent indeed._

A moment passes, and you whisper, not I: "_You have listened to your fears, child."_ (1) For the millionth time today your tears flow, but these have no sorrow, only shame, and you curl up on yourself once more.

Oh, Susan, Susan. If you could only realize how I yearn to take that pain away, howI yearn to take you in my arms and feel your breath against my mane, to let you ride me across fields and through shadows of valleys and hear your child-like laughter in my ears as I did so long ago.

You close your eyes, shut them tight through the tears and I will you to remember me amidst your confusion, to remember all of me the way you used to, to remember me as something _more_ than a story or a childhood game.

Sobs subside and I hear you whisper, your voice cracking:

"_The wind was in our hair and you let us ride you. When you were tortured and she killed you, I cried but you stopped my tears with flowers that followed you. I was the last to see you, the last to realize that you were the one we were following, the last to realize that you were there... It was you, then. And then you said we'd never go back, and the game was over. At the end of it all, I'm still not sure who won."_

My heart cracks and splinters into a thousand pieces as you go on, your whispers fading off away, now.

"_I would give everything to go back, anything to go back to our mad fairy tales and children's games. I would give everything to have High King Peter here, or Edmund the Just, or to see in my mind's eye Cair Paravel once more with its flag waving in the sweet Narnian wind..."_

Your heart is hardened, frozen to me and I am holding you in my arms like the child you really are, yet you are slipping, slipping away into an abyss and I can't hold you back, Susan, not if you don't want to come...

"_I would give anything to go back, now, to those childhood days, anything for another carefree afternoon of stories while huddled in that old cupboard in Professor Diggory's house... Anything..."_

I will you, roaring into your spirit as you have seen me do, surging with hope that you might be brave, be brave and shake loose your façade, that wall that you erected so long ago that has festered and taken such deep, terrible roots in you. I will you to stop your words, to stop listening to the charming harp of your own lies to yourself, and to wake up and say my name in recognition with that love and joy that I have so missed seeing on your face.

I am still holding you as you fall into slumber, trapped in that hateful web of disbelief that you have spun, and I hold you still as I hear you whisper my name in fond farewell to your childhood friend of fantasy.

I hold you still, as my own tears fall, and then I turn away, hurting as I know you are hurting, and I, too, feel the seeds of your grief and sorrow twisting up in barbed vines around you and making you bleed and cry out in pain...

Oh, my child. How I wish you would remember me, and remember my love for you, and know that, as I have promised, my love for you will not grow cold. That it has not grown cold, that it will never fade away! You are my Queen, the gentle Susan, Queen of Narnia, and I yearn so much to place that crown upon your sweet head once more and take you home with me to the place you ought to be. How I wish you would _remember_...

**_Oh, Susan._**

**- - -**

(1) Book IV, Prince Caspian, Chapter Eleven.


End file.
